Daily Blog - Friday June 12th

Today’s Blog is really about irony. I take great pride in the accuracy of Phil Steele Publications. I have a staff of roughly 30 employees that go thru every stat in the magazine with a fine tooth comb. We compare the team stats to the conference stats, NCAA stats and to our own stats which we tabulate weekly. I feel the statistics in the magazine are 99.9% accurate and they are checked to the conference pages and crosschecked everywhere. Each page goes thru 4 or 5 full proofs and then even a final proof and then a final-final proof. I hate it when a mistake slips though the cracks.

I also take great pride in the Accuracy of my predictions in the magazine. I write each of the 120 team previews myself. Most of the other magazines have each conference written by a different writer from that conferences area. I put my name on the front of the magazine and my goal each year is to have pick every conference perfect. Naturally that is an unreasonable goal but my magazine is the MOST accurate over the past 10 years and it is not really close.

Now if given the choice between a mistake on a stat of a team page and mistake in one of the extra articles I write, I would prefer the mistake be in the extra articles and they do not go through as complete a proof process (we only have so many man hours). Still my bottom line preference is to have zero mistakes in the magazine.

This year Tim Sullivan who writes for the New York Post was kind enough to write an article on my magazine being the most accurate over the last 10 years. When Tim did the article he requested a print off of the 10 years statistics. I handwrote out the standings and moved the magazines in the current order of the last 10 years. The correct numbers for 2008 were put in
and the magazines were ranked in the proper order but somehow the NINE YEAR totals was brought over from last year. That is the reason that you look at Lindy’s with 1315 which should be behind the Sporting News at 1328. The actual totals are The Sporting News at 1480 (after adding in 2008) and Lindy’s at 1483. The order is correct for the ten magazines listed, only the
10 year total score is wrong.

In the article Tim states that we have a 26 point lead on Athlon and that is because those are the numbers we sent him. The actual lead is 30 points over Athlon, 57 points over the Sporting News and 60 points over Lindy’s. Talk about an irony, my Most Accurate Article in the most accurate magazine has one of the few typos in the entire magazine!

Listed below is the correct chart and we have made it the exact same size as the chart on page 307 of the magazine. If you could do me a favor, print the chart off and paste it over you chart on page 307 so the magazine will not have that typo in it the rest of the year.